Who and What is Arts Education For?

Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937) has been an influential force as an artist, theorist, teacher and curator for nearly five decades.

September 2, 2014

We may consider art as a way of thinking, acquiring, and ordering knowledge with a boundless use of our imagination, to make connections, and as a tool for subverting conventions in order to refresh and shape culture and improve society.

“Art thinking” can be viewed as speculation based on wonder, free of dogma, not discarding anything except the overly obvious and trivial. Even chaos is part of this totality: non-logical, non-linear connections may be used as much as logical ones, and everything is available when seeking to construct new systems of order.

From this point of view art includes both science and magic: it doesn’t leave anything out. Art is not situated in between; it is the umbrella that hovers over and includes everything. This inclusiveness makes art a meta-discipline and science, if I dare say it, must be viewed as one of the many sub-categories of art.

An obvious question would be: Why can’t art thinking be integrated into other areas of thought? We need to change curricula and then slowly find ways to infiltrate other schools, other disciplines, and requiring them to adopt us.

With this approach, we could potentially achieve a true liberal arts college and true education. What are the impediments, the age-old structures that we might examine? Why, for example, must teaching art in public schools be justified as a way of improving or supporting education in science and mathematics, instead of them helping improve creative thinking? What is it that policy makers want art to “do” and are their expectations realistic, helpful or harmful? Do art schools merely perpetuate these artificial divisions?

It’s become quite common to find articles in business-oriented publications where Masters of Arts programs are likened to Masters in Business Administration programs, encouraging the thinking that a Master of Fine Arts degree is the new MBA.